CALGARY — Mark Giordano harbours no resentment against the 30 teams that passed him over in the National Hockey League entry draft.

Same goes for the 20 Ontario Hockey League teams that took a pass at the 1997 bantam draft.

“To be honest, I wasn’t that good,” the Calgary Flames defenceman says. “I was a smaller guy. I wasn’t huge. I started focusing on working out in the gym as I got older.

“Some guys are just better pro players than junior players.”

Are they ever. The Giordano case study proves that hockey scouting is not an exact science. Talent analysis of teenagers is a crap-shoot, with some players realizing their potential long after their draft year.

How else can you explain Scotty Bowman singling out Giordano as the most improved player in the NHL?

No one, not even Giordano himself, could have envisioned such a Hollywood script. After all, the six-foot, 203-pounder actually enrolled in business at York University after finishing his junior career with the OHL’s Owen Sound Attack in 2004.

With no NHL teams calling and his junior hockey career in the books, Giordano figured the time had come to formulate another game plan for his life.

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he says. “I knew I was going to go to school and get a business degree. I had everything set up, picked out all my classes.”

His career objectives were fuzzy, but Giordano wanted a university education and wanted to suit up for the York University men’s hockey club — unless an NHL team decided to take a flyer on him, that is.

“I liked accounting a lot,” he says. “I took a few courses in accounting online and I didn’t mind it. But I was young. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was all over the map. One day, I wanted to be a lawyer or a teacher, then the next day, I wanted to be a police officer.

“I was just really going to go to school, get a degree and go from there.”

Destiny intervened when Flames GM Darryl Sutter called with an invitation to summer development camp as an undrafted free agent.

Five years later, Giordano has shown he belongs in the NHL. Five years later, the Hockey News and ESPN are calling him one of the most underrated players in the game.

“I’m very happy and very proud of him,” says Mike Stothers, who coached Giordano in Owen Sound. “He’s certainly beat the odds of being an unknown person. Now, everybody is talking about him.

“He should be very, very proud of himself.”

Stothers, now an assistant coach with the Atlanta Thrashers, knows Giordano better than most. He met the future NHLer as a 19-year-old trying to make the OHL as a walk-on.

Not exactly a high-percentage venture.

“I remember he stood out, because he wore green pants in training camp,” Stothers says. “He brought his own pants. Everybody else was wearing black, and he had these green pants.

“But every day — not just because of the pants — I noticed the guy for all the right reasons. He just wouldn’t quit. Kept working hard. Kept improving. There were no real expectations of him at the time.”

Against the odds, the newcomer cracked the opening-day roster and earned a nickname — the true sign of belonging in the hockey world.

“We affectionately called him George,” Stothers says of the man better known these days as Gio. “And it stuck. George is not a self promoter. He certainly doesn’t even enjoy talking about himself. There’s not a whole lot of flash to his game. It’s not like he’s going to electrify people with end-to-end rushes with his speed. He has a good shot, but it’s not like it’s a Shea Weber from Nashville, who has a cannon.

“He just does all the little things well.”

Does he ever. Giordano can take care of matters in his own zone, skate, move the puck, and punish any forward who dares come his way.

For proof, ask Ben Ondrus. In trademark fashion, Giordano tried to put the Edmonton Oilers prospect through the glass in a 1-0 pre-season victory for the Flames last Sunday at the Saddledome. Bleeding profusely, Ondrus required eight stitches to close a gash above his eye.

“He’s a hard man to play against,” Stothers says. “He likes to make it miserable for the opposition. If you’re going to go into a corner or along the walls with him, you know you’re going in for a battle, and chances are you’re going to come out with a bump or a welt or two.

“He just plays hard. He’s very competitive. He’s not easily swayed.”

On the ice, or in real life.

Take his decision in 2007 to play for the Moscow Dynamo of Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League, when the Flames chose not to give him one-way deal. With Mike Keenan coaching the Flames, Giordano had no idea if he would play 27 minutes a night in Calgary or none or, even worse, toil in the minors.

The jump to Russia was not popular among the Flames brass, but Giordano made the move to further his career in the manner he saw fit.

“I don’t think it hurt me development-wise,” he says. “If anything, it made me a better player. I played a lot of minutes over there and got a lot of ice time. It worked out in the end, that’s all anybody can really say.

“It could have gone the other way, but it didn’t.”

North American players don’t generally hold up their hands and volunteer to play in Russia, but Giordano didn’t hesitate.

“It’s not like you’re in a Rocky movie where you’re a cabin in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I didn’t have a problem with Russia. I was living in a big city. It felt like any other big city. It just that the language barrier was tough. It was tough to do everyday things like banking and groceries and all that.

“It’s a different style of hockey, but there’s a lot of skilled hockey players over there.”

Building on his KHL experience, Giordano signed a three-year deal with the Flames. He broke out last season with career highs of 11 goals, 30 points and led the team with a plus-17 rating.

But what’s next? Giordano makes $892,000 US a season, so he’s a steal under the NHL economic system. That won’t last long, with free agency looming on July — unless he re-signs in Calgary.

“This is a great organization,” he says. “A great city. Guys love to play here, and I’m one of them. But we’ll see how it goes. The main thing for me is this is where I want to be, and it’s a great organization and it’s surrounded by great people.”

“It was never that big of a deal to me that I didn’t get drafted,” he says. “I don’t think guys should feel their lives are over if that happens. I think you just have to know if you’re good enough, you’re going to get an opportunity to play.”

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